About a year ago I was driving through the mountains in Colorado. I wondered how these many little towns got their water?
I live in the midwest and there are lots of little towns and many (most?) have water towers so easy enough to see how they get their water. But I never saw water towers in small mountain town Colorado.
Then I wondered where their waste goes (think toilet flush)?
Most mountain towns are on streams/creeks/rivers, so if they have a municipal sewage plant it discharges into that. As said by @vbob, there are a lot of individual leach fields (we’re on one right now, built 2 years ago in Bozeman). Some privy’s are grandfathered in, but the health departments are gung-ho to get them gone.
If they have room uphill, they don’t have to build a tower. Our little water company has a big tank at a high point in town, and it acts like a water tower would in a flat area. The pump water into the tank from our aquifer.
How does an ISDS work in the town center where there are businesses? Does every restaurant run its own septic tank? That would seem impractical but I do not know (really asking).
Septic tanks with leach fields were an early and widespread leap forward from cesspools, but there are many advanced ‘systems’ tailored to particular soils and situations nowadays. A well designed and nurtured septic tank rarely needs pumping - a lot depends on much material is flushed that cannot be broken down by bacterial action - but modern humans will notoriously flush almost anything.
Generally yes - any green space they’d rather pave for parking is probably part of leach field…
required setbacks of ISDS from property lines are usually less than required spacing between ISDS and wells, thus one property owner building an ISDS system can often prevent an adjoining landowner from drilling a well. Politics ensues.
Rural areas use decentralized septic systems. By that, I mean in situ treatment. For commercial systems like restaurants, it usually starts with a grease-interceptor tank, followed by a septic tank, and often a pretreatment system (usually some kind of aerobic system), followed by a dispersal system (putting the effluent back into the receiving environment). Depending on the sensitivity of the receiving environment, different types of treatment systems are used. For small towns, decentralized septic systems usually involve pretreatment (e.g. septic tanks), followed by a collection system and a treatment system. Interestingly, these types of localized treatment systems typically out-perform big-city municipal treatment plants with respect to BOD, TSS, pathogens, and nitrogen (i.e. ammonia, nitrates). One advantage to decentralize systems it that they typically don’t overflow during high-precipitation events and dump untreated wastewater into the receiving environment (e.g. rivers, the ocean). One challenge to decentralized systems is the requirement for maintenance. Most US states, as well as most developed countries, have highly developed onsite wastewater programs; others don’t. Another interesting aspect of decentralized systems is the potential for nutrient capture (nitrates, phosphorus) for fertilizer, removal of trace contaminants, and also for waster reuse, especially for irrigation. It’s an interesting emerging technology.
So my small exurban town in Connecticut does not have a wastewater treatment plant. In the center of town, sanitary sewage is collected by gravity sewers to a central wastewater pumping station, then pumped via force main about five miles or so to a town that does have a wastewater treatment plant. My town’s flow is metered and the other town charges for this treatment.
Outside of the town center, everyone has septic tanks, including my house. Note that a properly designed and maintained septic system is perfectly fine with respect to protecting human health and the environment. The main downside is the need to pump the septic tank periodically and the fact it requires a relatively large amount of land area. My single-family house is on an acre of land, for example, which is just about the minimum lot size necessary to safely separate my septic system from my neighbor’s water well (and vice versa).
Years ago there was another town near mine that not only did not have a wastewater treatment plant, but also did not have a central sewage pumping station. So every structure in the town was on septic, including businesses and a school. The school’s septic system was fairly large and elaborate, as you might expect.
One problem with the town was that there were a lot of houses surrounding the largish pond in the center of town, all of which had inadequate septic systems that were installed many decades ago. The leachate from these systems was inadequately treated and was polluting the pond, and the lots were too small to install a proper septic system. Connecticut DEEP eventually required the town to correct this, so they had to install a sewage collection system and centralized pumping station to pump the sanitary sewage to the town that did have a treatment plant.
Does that mean every home had to connect to the new sewage system? I imagine that would be very expensive. What happens if a homeowner refuses to pay the cost? (or cannot afford the cost?)
There’s a difference between “where they get their water” and the fact they have a water tower. In most cases the water tower is used for storage and to create pressure in the system. The water in the tower can come from a nearby river or stream, or a series of water wells, before going through the treatment plant, assuming there is a treatment plant. Without a tower they’d have to have on demand pumps to react to varying usage levels.
It takes some getting used to, but in much of the Caribbean only urine and feces can be flushed. Bathrooms have a garbage can where toilet paper goes. Restaurants usually have an older woman who cleans the bathroom between users. I always tip them a dollar.
Fun fact–some friends bought a cabin in the mountains of SW Colorado. The drains started backing up, so they dug up the septic system: a 55 gallon drum full of gravel with holes punched in the sides, no leach field. That got expensive, but it had worked (sorta) for 100 years.
I’d not be surprised to find your friends, being city folks, had flushed about 10x the volume of wrong stuff than the previous rural folks had been used to doing.
Suburban Americans are used to thinking of toilet and sink drains as magic disintegration chambers: anything goes in, nothing comes out in either direction. Tain’t so.
They weren’t new to mountain living, but maybe. A lot of mountainous terrain is either glacial alluvium or river/creek deposits, so tends to perc super fast (often too fast for a traditional leach field). Where we live (Bridger Range, MT) is an exception–mostly clay.
